Step-by-Step Azure Migration Planning

Migrating your datacenter to an IaaS platform like Azure is a big step for small businesses. There are many benefits to moving to the cloud – like increased productivity, better agility and decreased costs – but getting there is a daunting process.

In this guide, we’ll break down the specific steps involved in each phase to guarantee a successful migration.

Breaking Down Azure Migration Phases

Microsoft recommends a four-step migration process for migrating to Azure:

Discover

Discovery involves identifying all existing workloads and applications in your infrastructure so you can prepare them for migration. It’s an extensive and tedious process, but critical to success.

Missed applications and workloads can become headaches later on, so you’ll want to make sure your application inventory is complete and up-to-date.

Review these areas during the preparation phase:

Virtual Networks

To maintain the same datacenter performance, security and stability while managing costs, analyze your on-premises workloads in your existing virtual or physical environment and compare them to equivalent resources in Azure. Be sure to address networking requirements, how many subnets you’ll need to provision, and whether you’ll provide your own DNS servers via Active Directory.

Storage Solution

Purchasing new storage every time you reach capacity is a constant burden. There are a few types of Azure storage to consider depending on the nature of your data.

Hot vs. cold: How you store your data in Azure depends on how often users access it. A multi-temperature data management solution will help you conserve costs. Hot data requires fast storage, while data that is rarely accessed (cold data) is stored on the slowest storage.

Compute

The cloud gives you instant access to computing resources. When planning, you should look into Azure Autoscale. The autoscaling feature dynamically scales applications to meet changing performance requirements.

Azure virtual machines will also give you more control over your computing environment. An Azure VM gives you the flexibility of virtualization without having to buy and maintain costly physical hardware.

Assess

Once you have a better understanding of Azure products and how they fit into your migration strategy, it’s time to evaluate your existing infrastructure. Here are some tools to help:

This tool automatically inspects your on-premises environment, whether physical or virtualized, and provides a checklist for moving your workloads to the cloud. After the assessment, the tool generates a report detailing the workload attributes/configuration that are ready to move and what requires further investigation before moving. The report also provides additional resources to resolve issues and prepare the workload for a move to Azure.

Both of these tools can help you carefully review and document all applications, workloads and processes you currently use, including:

Current Infrastructure: Map your virtual and physical system configurations to an equivalent Azure instance. Evaluate specs like CPUs, disk size and storage demand.

Current Network Architecture and Capacity: Assessing your network architecture and capacity will help you evaluate bandwidth to replicate changes made on virtual machines. Use a capacity planning tool or bandwidth assessment tool to determine whether replicating a virtual machine would kill your network.

Performance Requirements: You need to know what IOPS you’ll require to avoid lags and maintain the same performance in your new Azure environment.

High Availability/Resilience Requirements: You need a system that will function in the event of failure. Thoroughly document your disaster recovery processes, resiliency configurations and recovery time objectives to ensure your data can be restored easily in your new environment.

Maintenance Process: Once you move to Azure, what maintenance steps need to happen to continue running effectively? Determine how your maintenance process will need to change in the new cloud environment.

Target

Now that you’ve audited your existing environment, it’s time to map out how to get your servers in Azure.

Have questions about mapping your existing workloads in Azure?Schedule a free call with one of Agile IT’s cloud migration specialists.

Factors like speed, ease of migration, cost and desired functionality will inform the cloud destination for your workloads. For instance, websites would benefit most from the speed of Azure data centers, elasticity of the storage, processing power and memory. These factors help keep sites responsive even during peak demand.

Virtual machines are another component to consider. VMs are on the other side of an Internet connection and subject to the unpredictable nature of Internet latency. Most companies prefer to migrate non-critical VMs to less expensive cloud resources. You’ll want to put VMs in the cloud that won’t be adversely impacted by latency and don’t require frequent connections to other resources.

Operating systems are another consideration. Is the workload you wish to migrate running an Azure-supported operating system?

Still have workloads running on physical servers? The terms for converting physical server workloads into a VM aren’t always straightforward. Working with a proven partner can streamline the process.

Migrate

Now that you’ve audited and prepared your existing workloads and applications, you’re ready to migrate to Azure.

You can spend significant time reading up on best practices, studying available tools and preparing for the trial-and-error inherent in any new pursuit. But the potential savings are not worth the risk involved in attempting a complex cloud migration without the right expertise.

Looking for help planning and carrying out your Azure migration? At Agile IT, our cloud experts have successfully migrated more than 1,000 companies to the cloud. Request a quote below, or schedule a free call today to learn how to extract the most value from Azure.